1. Field of Invention
Aspects of the invention can relate to a liquid crystal display and an electronic apparatus. More specifically, the invention can relate to a liquid crystal display including vertically aligned liquid crystal and providing an image with a high contrast and a wide viewing angle.
2. Description of Related Art
Related art liquid crystal displays can include transreflective liquid crystal displays having a reflective mode and a transmissive mode. One of such transreflective liquid crystal displays includes a liquid crystal layer interposed between an upper substrate and a lower substrate. On the inner surface of the lower substrate there is a metal reflective film, which, for example, is composed of aluminum, having a window for transmitting light. The reflective film functions as a transreflective plate. In such a case, in the reflective mode, external light entering from the upper substrate passes through the liquid crystal layer, and is reflected at the inner surface of the lower surface. Then, the reflected light passes through the liquid crystal layer again and is emitted from the upper substrate to contribute to the display. In the transmissive mode, light entering from a backlight to the lower substrate passes through the liquid crystal layer via the window on the reflective film. Then, the light is emitted from the upper substrate to the outside to contribute to the display. In other words, within the region with the reflective film, the region where the window is formed is a transmissive display region and the region excluding the window is a reflective display region.
Related art transreflective liquid crystal displays, however, have a problem in that the viewing angle is small in the transmissive mode. This small viewing angle is caused because reflective display can be accomplished by only one polarizer disposed on the side of the viewer due to the structure, wherein a transreflective plate is disposed on the inner surface of a liquid crystal cell, so that parallax is not generated. In other words, the flexibility of the optical design is small. To solve this problem, Jisaki et al., in, “Development of transreflective LCD for high contrast and wide viewing angle by using homeotropic alignment”, M. Jisaki et al., Asia Display/IDW'01, p. 133-136 (2001) have proposed a new liquid crystal display using vertically aligned liquid crystal. This related art liquid crystal display has the following three characteristics:                1) A vertical alignment mode in which the negative liquid crystal is vertically aligned by dielectric anisotropy and tilted by an applied voltage.        2) A multi-gap structure in which the thickness of the liquid crystal layer (cell gap) differs in the transmissive display region and the reflective display region. See, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 11-242226 for the multi-gap structure.        3) A multi-domain structure in which alignment protrusion are formed of the center of the transmissive display region on an opposing substrate for omnidirectionally tilting the liquid crystal in the transmissive display region, which is shaped like a regular octagon.        